In the London Times, Mary Beard shows us The Strangely Familiar World of Oxyrhynchus. Oxyrhynchus is the Egyptian town where hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts were discovered in the early twentieth century — including fragments of Christian apocrypha and the New Testament. It’s an entertaining essay that raises important questions about how and why we read history. The occasion is the publication of City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish by Peter Parsons.